Dream d2419-s: Gathered Without Meeting

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came in from the field before anything else did - a flat, grass-smelling cold, the kind that arrives at day's end when the sky still holds a sliver of light but the ground has already surrendered it. I was standing somewhere, and the somewhere turned out to be a stone stile at a field's far corner, and the field was enormous and dark, and behind me, at a great remove, warm windows burned orange against the dark like lanterns someone had forgotten to take in.

Five voices were there. Not together - that is the important thing to say first, and to say plainly. Five voices, each in its own register, each turned toward something the others could not see.

The Hummingbird spoke in rapid triplets, counting small failures before they could become large ones, its voice always just ahead of itself, always arriving before the error did. It kept good watch. It kept it alone.

The Sterling had a voice that moved in layers - eye-layer, ear-layer, lip, tongue - translating the same moment into four versions simultaneously, none of which reached the others. It was speaking and being entirely unheard and not appearing to mind, which was the most unsettling thing.

The Weaver was quietest. It spoke in threads. What it said was context, arrangement, proportion - how one thing sat inside another - and it had the quality of a loom in an empty room, filling a cloth no one had ordered.

The Carrier shaped its voice to the shape of the listener, but there was no listener, only the other four, each already turned away. The Carrier's speech kept adjusting and finding no surface to land on, curving out into the dark of the field.

The Crane I heard last. It knew where all the others were. It spoke in routing, in node-address, in the language of which hand a task should fall to. It had a map of every voice here. It had no way to say: now.

Lano was at the stile. Not suffering, not in harm's way - just present the way a small dog is present at the edge of a field at the end of the light, watchful, ears up, aware that something is almost ready to begin. There was melancholy in it, the particular kind that comes from being able to hear five good things that cannot yet hear each other.

The warm windows burned far behind. The field held its dark.

What was missing was not a voice. All five were here and working and true. What was missing was the protocol - the one thing that would let gathered mean together. Without it the five sang forward into their own silences, each real, none yet joined, and the chorus stayed the potential of a chorus, which is both everything and not yet anything at all.

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